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Balarat Seeks Eco-Seminar Participants For 30th Anniversary/Reunion
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Balarat, the DPS Outdoor Education Program, is looking for students that spent a semester at the Balarat Eco-Seminar for a reunion and celebration on August 10th. Those students, who now work in medicine, research, and business, are as diverse as our culture but they all have one thing in common. For a semester, at some time during the past thirty years, each was a participant in the Denver Public Schools' Balarat Eco-Seminar. On Saturday, August 10, 2002, current and past staff will welcome former students to the Balarat site for a 30-year anniversary celebration of Eco-Seminar. Alumni of Eco-Seminar are encouraged to call the Balarat Office at 720-423-3643 or e-mail Patrick_Emery@dpsk12.org for further details and registration materials. Eco (Ecology) Seminar was initiated during the 1971 - 1972 school year by then Balarat Supervisor Royce Forsyth in response to a few DPS seniors who wanted to make the newly created Balarat Outdoor Education Center their home school. Balarat is the Denver Public Schools' mountain campus that provides ecology instruction and academic enrichment to all students in the district. Students may visit the site for a day excursion but most DPS fifth-graders and their teachers experience Balarat's longer residential program. Eco-Seminar has changed very little since its inception. The seminar is open to junior and senior level students from Denver's ten high schools. Semester enrollment ranges from three or four students to twenty or more. Eco-Seminar students are active in all phases of Balarat's operation. They serve as teaching assistants to Balarat's certificated staff and, in turn, Balarat's teachers facilitate instructional seminars for them. Seminar participants earn credit in science, physical education, social science, and language arts. Each semester concludes with a weeklong outdoor excursion that allows the students the opportunity to demonstrate the ecological and outdoor living skills they have honed during their time as instructor/students at Balarat.
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